Gaming establishments strive to make wagering as enjoyable, entertaining and exciting as possible for players. Gaming tournaments are exciting for certain players and are a widely used form of casino promotion. Frequently, tournaments are conducted at a bank or group of gaming machines such as slot machines as a form of promotion.
Certain tournaments are conducted at casino tables such as blackjack or poker tables. These tournaments, sometimes called table tournaments, enable players to play table games such as blackjack, baccarat or poker as part or all of a tournament. Known table tournaments are a manual process. The player is manually registered. The progress of the tournament is manually monitored and the outcome is manually determined.
In certain manual table tournaments, the players must register with casino personnel. Each player may be required to pay an entry fee. Upon completion of these steps, the casino provides the registered players chips to use in the tournament. The casino manually sets up the tournament. For example, the table tournament may have a certain number of rounds, a certain number hands or a time limit. The winner of the tournament is determined by which player has the most chips or highest value of chips at the end. The chips and the chip values are counted manually. The outcome of a “number of hands” table tournament is solely based on the number or value of chips the players each have after a designated number of hands. The outcome of a “total time” tournament is solely based on the number or value of chips the players each have after a certain amount of time has passed.
Certain known table tournaments include a checkpoint, such as a point after a designated number of hands, to assess the progress of the tournament. Results may be assessed and posted at this time. In table tournaments, manual monitoring and reporting is required. Casino personnel manually count each player's chips or chip values each time tournament progress needs to be assessed, such as at the end of the tournament, at the end of the round, or at a checkpoint. The casino personnel must go to every station of every player enrolled in the tournament and make an assessment of their chip total. After the progress report is generated (usually after the delay required to collect the data), the results are shown on a display for the players to view.
Additionally, these types of manual table tournaments are often required to be done at the same time and therefore limit player flexibility. Players participating in the table tournament are generally required to play at one location and complete the tournament at the same time because someone must count the players' chips at each assessment point of the tournament.
Dedicated gaming tables are dedicated for playing in a tournament and are therefore not played when a tournament is not in progress. That is, the dedicated tournament gaming tables are only active during tournament play and do not provide players the ability to play other non-tournament games on these dedicated tournament tables.
Thus, there are many drawbacks to dedicated gaming table tournaments. The manual nature is very time consuming. It takes a considerable amount of time for the casino personnel to count each player's chips. This is costly in both lost revenue opportunities for the time of the chip counting and the lost employee time. Additionally, the need for dedicated tables costs the casino in terms of space and lost play. That is, this gaming table dedication is costly to a casino because they take up space in the casino and because they are unoccupied or not played in a conventional manner for significant amounts of time.
Additionally, the manual table tournament process can be error-prone if not very carefully monitored. The human factor of manually counting each player's chips or chip values may lead to counting errors. A player may dispute a payout made by the dealer as inaccurate, such as being paid only 1:1 on a blackjack instead of 3:2 and dispute the results of the tournament.
Therefore, there is a need to provide a new tournament system to improve aspects of the configuration and implementation of table tournament game play.